Music & The Brain, Part I

Recently I have been contemplating music and how the brain works. I don't know if I have any profound thoughts about the relationship between music and the brain, so I won't venture much commentary here. But I thought I might start some random, abstract pieces to help trace something of a picture of this fascinating realm of neuroscience.

Music and the brain is not just about whether or not Mozart makes us smarter or how our musical preferences are formed. It is also about who and how we are as human beings. As one of the scientists in the following video passionately asserts, music is an entire nervous system endeavor. Music connects to language, emotion, relationality, motion, fine motor control, memory, etc. Music transgresses every boundary in the brain. It is everywhere and in specific places. It literally fills us up!

My musing on music and brain began with a video of Bobby McFerrin demonstrating the power of the pentatonic scale to transcend cultural expectations of music and tonality.



I've seen this video numerous times, and it always creates wonder. Why does this work? And why does it work around the world? It shows music to be a very powerful unifying and participative force.

This weekend, I decided to watch the entire panel from the World Science Festival, "Notes and Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus." I am still processing the session... Here it is in its entirety:

Beethoven's 5th Symphony

It is a truism that Beethoven's 5th Symphony is one of the great treasures of the Western world. It has inspired many a musician and concert goer, as well as many comedians! Beethoven himself referred to the famous motive of the first movement of this work as the knock of fate: bom, bom, bom, bohm! bom, bom, bom, bohm!! Can't you just feel it in your bones?

So, just for a bit of fun, and in honor of my symphony playing this in our next concert, here is PDQ Bach's take on the first movement of Beethoven's 5th. I don't know who or where this particular orchestra is, but it is fun to watch them play together with Peter Schickele (aka PDQ Bach).

More Beauty to Inspire

I love it when students send interesting music to me. This one really caught me off guard. I've been listening to samples of their music on ITunes all day. I don't even know if I can type their name, but it is on the video title. I have a Faroese friend, I should ask him about the group and the name. I looked it up, it means something like "Season," but you know how translation works. As one of my Hebrew profs once said, reading in translation is like kissing your spouse through wax paper... Hmmm...

Anyway, more beauty to inspire as you work and dream and (perhaps) sing ...

Football, Coaches, & Love

I just read an article in the Seattle Times that really moved me. Larry Stone compared PLU's Frosty Westering and UW's Don James. Perhaps my response is due to my Luteness (PLU's mascot, even though none of us ever really knew what a Lute was - though Frosty seemed to!). Frosty's presence on campus, even for us music majors, loomed large. He didn't just coach football, he curated a culture. It was clear to everyone at PLU that the football players where steeped in a culture of hard work, discipline, integrity, and love. Stone says it well, Westering "taught thousands of young men that you could use love as a motivator in a game predicated on violence." That Frosty was also one of the top 10 winningest college coaches of all time just shows that an ethic of love and excelling in sports are not mutually exclusive. Who would have thought it? A Christian ethic of love in the midst of a championship team.

So, to all the coaches out there that have formed young minds and hearts, thank you for all that you do!

A Bit of Beauty and Inspiration

As you are all reading and writing papers, here is a little bit of beautiful music to enlighten and inspire. Thanks to Jonna for the link!




Now, a little inspiration for all y'all, from Henri Nouwen's Theological Ideas in Education: 

Most students...feel that they must first have something to say before they can put it down on paper. For them writing is little more than recording a preexistent thought. But...writing is a process in which we discover what lives in us. The writing itself reveals what is alive.

In another place he writes:

The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write. To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know....Writing is like giving away the few loaves and fishes one has, in trust that they will multiply in the giving. Once we dare to "give away" on paper the few thoughts that come to us, we start discovering how much is hidden underneath...and gradually come in touch with our own riches. 

Hope your writing is going well! And may you indeed come in touch with your own riches!! 

St. Patrick & The Trouble of Analogies about the Trinity

As we have found in class, there are many ways to talk about God, but often our language fails our search for deeper articulation and expression. Here is a bit of a fun video that plays with the trinitarian analogies of St. Patrick and how our language often misses the mark. If only he had used musical space as an analogy...

Arvo Pärt: Music and Relational Space

Arvo Pärt is an Estonian composer, born in 1935.[1] He is one of the “Holy Minimalist” composers of the former eastern block countries. Sometimes Pärt’s music is referred to as “the soundtrack to our age.” His music is used in a lot of movies, often to provide a kind of “emotional distance,” as Pärt scholar Andrew Shenton articulates it. 

Pärt is known for his “economy of expression.” He is famous for saying “it is enough when one note is beautifully played.” His music is deeply contemplative, almost like an icon. His compositions often focus on a single element or concept, turning it over and over within musical space. Pärt seems to want to move the listener’s focus away from the music itself, so that she can meditate upon the divine.

One of his most evocative innovations is tinntinabuli music or tinntintabulation. It is called this because of the bell-like quality of the music (though this is not a literalistic ringing of bells).[2] “It is comprised of two musical lines that have a fixed relationship: one uses the notes of the ‘tonic’ triad, while the other moves largely by step.”[3] Pärt’s wife, Nora, a musicologist and conductor, analyzes this music as “1+1+1=1.” This is non-competitive space in that it is relational and mutually enhancing. There is a "moreness" to the relationship of the notes.

His first two compositions in this style were Für Alina in 1976 and Spiegel Im Spiegel (mirror in the mirror) in 1978. Für Alina was written for a friend who was separated from her young daughter, because the daughter was living in London with her father. (The mother was stuck in communist ruled Estonia at the time.) We can hear in this music the longing of a mother in the midst of a prolonged separation. There are two lines in this music. One line moves stepwise, the other stays on a triad, grounding the more fluid line in a foundational layer of sound.[4] As Pärt describes this music: “ ‘The two lines. One line is who we are, and the other line is who is holding and takes care of us. Sometimes I say … that the melodic line is our reality, our sins. But the other line is forgiving the sins.’ ”[5]

The other piece, Spiegel Im Spiegel (mirror in the mirror), exemplifies the Eastern Orthodox doctrine of deification, or that the human person stands before God like a mirror of God’s glory, only we reflect that glory dimly. Throughout our lives, the Spirit’s role in our lives is to polish us. The image of God is always there, we just reflect with more and more brilliance through the mediation of the Son and the Spirit.

Below is a video of Pärt talking about Für Alina. I love how he talks about how the magic of the line emerges with the relationship between the melodies. This is a capaciousness, a relational “moreness” in how he talks about the simplicity and the mutuality of the music. Evocative of the possibilities of freedom in relational space.

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[1] I’m grateful for the recent lecture/recital by Andrew Shenton of Boston University on Pärt’s tintinnabuli technique: “Disclosing the Divine: Computer-Aided Analysis of Pärt’s Tininnabuli Technique,” at the Forum on Music in Christian Scholarship Conference, Calvin College, Saturday February 18, 2012.

[2] URL: http://www.arvopart.org/tintinnabulation.html (accessed on June 3, 2011).

[3] From Shenton’s abstract for the FMCS conference.

[4]  ‘ “The first period was very strict,” Nora said. “It was very important for Arvo to give himself a system, rules and discipline. And over time, Arvo had more and more freedom.”

“I believed in myself more and more,” he said. Then he added: “It can be good or bad. It is dangerous, this freedom.”

“Without discipline, freedom is very dangerous,” Nora said, with emphasis.

“In some way, we go back to the tintinnabuli,” Arvo resumed. “One line is like freedom, and the triad line is like discipline. It must work together.” ’ (Arthur Lubow, “The Sound of Spirit,” The New York Times Magazine, October 15, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/magazine/17part-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (accessed October 23, 2012).

[5] Lubow, “The Sound of Spirit.” Lubow’s description: “The melody, which proceeds mainly in steps up and down the scale, might be compared to a child tentatively walking. The second line underpins each note of the melody with a note from a harmonizing triad (the fundamental chord of Western music) that is positioned as close as possible to the note of the melody, but always below. You could imagine this accompaniment to be a mother with her hands outstretched to ensure her toddler doesn’t fall.” Another favorite quote from Pärt in this article: ‘ “There is a good rule in spiritual life, which we all forget continually,” he said, “that you must see more of your own sins than other people’s.” He remarked that the sum of human sin has been growing since Adam’s time, and we all share some of the blame. “So I think everyone must say to himself, ‘We must change our thinking.’ We cannot see what is in the heart of another person. Maybe he is a holy man, and I can see only that he is wearing a wrong jacket.” ’